New ESSAYS QUITE OFTENNEW STORIES AND SONGSEVERY now and then

To be sure, I wasn’t spending the day lazing around. I had a lot of other writing to do, boring stuff for an official document that I’m working on. I spent a few hours on it, got it done, and was proud of myself.

\After that, Megan and I went to the The Bit Bar in Salem, and played some pinball. Our two favorite machines are Star Wars and Dialed In. Addams Family, alas, is absent, but they tell us it’s coming back soon.

We had chicken fingers and Tetris Tots, which are tater tots in the shape of the blocks from the legendary video game. It was great, as it always is.We went shopping, went home, had dinner, and watched the miniseries “To Serve Them All My Days.”

I got tired. I realized that I hadn’t written. The notion of getting some sleep appealed to me far more than writing 500 words.

So I went to sleep, and for a day, my blog was silent.

Just as well, I thought to myself. Yes, it’s a noble goal I set for myself, this pact to put something up here every day, but there are times that it weighs me down like a millstone. Oh, no, I think to myself…must post something, must post something.

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Avery told me that it was probably a good idea to take a break. I told her that my only problem with taking a break was that I didn’t want one day without posting to grow into two days, then three, then a week, and so on.

And now, sitting here, working on a post, I see that such fears were unfounded. It’s okay to rest every so often. The world does not come to an end if I take a break.I tend to have a problem with moderation. If I decide, for example, that I’m drinking too much coffee, the solution is not to cut down to a cup a day. Instead, the solution is to stop drinking altogether. If I decide that I’m eating too many sweets or too much junk food, the solution is to eliminate them from my diet.

And so it is with writing. Either post something every day, or stop writing entirely. The notion of writing more or less every day and taking a break every so often is alien to me.

Yet this is the healthiest way to go through life. So often, the healthiest choices for most things lie not at either end of them, but somewhere in the middle. Finding a place that balances the two extremes of things is something that a person spends the rest of their life doing, and when they’re fortunate enough to find that fulcrum point where things balance out, they tend to be more content in that place than they could ever be at either end.​So yes, I didn’t post anything yesterday, but I posted something today, and will probably post something tomorrow. Or not. Either way, I’m still writing.